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A Conscious Coffee Lover’s Journey

Why You Need Cleaner Clothes

It’s anything but a circle of life. It takes 2/3 pound pesticides and 2,000 gallons of polluted water to make an average pair of jeans. Cotton farmers can no longer drink from their own wells, because of the chemical runoff. Asian garment workers sew our jeans in degrading sweatshop conditions for barely a subsistence wage.

I’ve loved coffee forever

When I was a teenager, my grandmother taught me to make latin-style cafe con leche. Creamy. Bitter. Sweet. Hot. Invigorating. My love has never faltered …

I’ve tasted all kinds

I’ve bought coffee beans from lots of small-batch roasters

I’ve tried various brewing methods to extract the best flavor

And more recently, I wondered, what toxic chemicals am I so carefully extracting from these coffee beans?

And I wondered …

What else am I so carefully extracting from these coffee beans along with their incredible flavor? Here’s what I learned:

The coffee industry uses more pesticides and herbicides than any other agricultural industry – worldwide – except cotton and tobacco. On top of that, they clear-cut rain forests to build coffee plantations (despite the fact that coffee trees grow naturally in the rainforest shade) and they displace coffee farmers to tend industrial-scale plantations that are unhealthy for them, for the earth, and for coffee drinkers.

Because I love coffee, I had to make a change.

Yes, for my health.

Yes, for the environment

Yes, for the sake of farm workers

I can’t un-know the dirty side of coffee

But even more, because coffee is a thing of beauty and I’ve got to know that it’s pure, inside and out.

I hear many say “2019 was the year when the public woke up to the climate crisis”.
This is a misconception.
A small but rapidly growing number of people have started to wake up to the climate crisis.
This has only just begun. We’re still only scratching the surface.